Studying the Correlation of Nurses Cultural Competency and patient Satisfaction in intensive care unit of hospitals affiliated to Kurdistan University of Medical Sciences in 2018

Introduction & Objective: Cultural competence is the ability to communicate effectively with people of different cultures. Since the nurses deal with patients from different cultures, cultural competence is one of the factors that affect the quality of nursing care. One of the criteria for measuring the quality of nursing care is patient satisfaction. So the purpose of this study is to review the correlation between nurses’ cultural competence and satisfaction of patients hospitalized in intensive care units of hospitals affiliated to Kurdistan University of Medical Sciences with the quality of nursing care in 2018. Methods: This descriptive correlation study was performed on 90 nurses and 270 patients in adult intensive care units of hospitals affiliated to Kurdistan University of Sciences in 2018 and quota sampling method was used. Four tools were used for data collection: Nurses Demographic Information Questionnaire, Nurses Cultural Competency Assessment Questionnaire, Patients Demographic Information Questionnaire, and Patient Satisfaction with Nurses Care Questionnaire. After obtaining informed consent, the questionnaires were distributed among the nurses and patients. After completing the questionnaires, the data were analyzed through analytical and descriptive statistical methods using SPSS software (version 22).  Findings: Nurses included 30 men (33.3 %) and 60 women (66.7%) with age average: 32.11±6.12 and the patients included 142 men (47.4%) and 128 women (52.6%) with age average: 49.88±16.95. Most nurses had an average level of cultural competence (51.1%) and most patients had an average level of satisfaction (61.3%). Statistical analysis showed that there is a meaningful relation between cultural care knowledge with employment in more than one section and between attitude toward cultural care and the work section (P-Value<0.05). There was no statistically significant relation between nurses' cultural competence and patients’ satisfaction (P-Value>0.05). Patients' satisfaction was statistically related to the age, length of hospitalization, ethnicity and religion of the patients (P-Value<0.05). Conclusion: Regarding the lack of relation between cultural competence and patient satisfaction in this study and the importance of patient satisfaction, it is suggested to identify other factors affecting patient satisfaction and to make the planning required to improve the patient satisfaction. One of the important factors in this field that seems to play a prominent role in our study is that the patients are not sufficiently aware of the duties and responsibilities of the nurses. This lack of awareness of the tasks could lead patients to have more expectations and failing to meet these expectations would lead to patient dissatisfaction.